Archive for December, 2011

Christopher Jensen reports in the New York Times on yet another disaster from the massive U.S. corporate-welfare (i.e., pork) for “green” cars, this time luxury vehicles for the uber-rich: Fisker Automotive is recalling all 239 of its 2012 Karma luxury plug-in hybrid cars because of a fire hazard, according to a report filed with the…Read More »

In a NBER working paper, Martin Feldstein argues that the Euro “should now be recognized as an experiment that has led to the sovereign debt crisis in several countries, the fragile condition of major European banks, the high levels of unemployment, and the large trade deficits that now exist in most Eurozone countries.” The…Read More »

Call it a Christmas miracle, if you will, but the U.S. Congress has managed to end one of the most egregious wastes of taxpayer dollars by doing what it really does best: nothing! Cars in Depth’s Ronnie Schreiber has the story: Lost in the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, Congress has quietly…Read More »

A recent Big Government article “It’s the Math, Stupid!: Seven Devastating Facts About 2012” discusses some upsetting numbers: Every day, the U.S. government takes in $6 billion and spends $10 billion. This means that every day the federal government spends $4 billion more dollars than it has. The real unemployment rate is a jaw-dropping 11 percent. Every fifth man you…Read More »

In “Problems possible with nearly 65,000 Arlington graves, report says” in the Washington Post, Christian Davenport reports that the newly released year-long study, after earlier reports of misidentified remains, shows that the 150-year-old, Army-run, Arlington National Cemetery has problems with 25% of the graves! Errors include “mismarked or unmarked graves, urns that had been…Read More »

Mark Spitznagel has a short op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where he illustrates the disastrous effects of central planning through monetary policy. The actions of the Federal Reserve have only allowed bad investments to persist and to postpone inevitable corrections necessary in the capital structure of the economy. Herein are pearls of great…Read More »

It’s official—the United States total public debt outstanding has now surpassed 100% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product. The last time it did that, the United States was fighting to win World War II…. Click here to see what the total value of the U.S. national debt is today.

In new analysis from the Mackinac Center, James Hohman discusses how $3 billion in federal and state funding for General Motors’ Chevy Volt, the much acclaimed “green,” plug-in, hybrid electric vehicle, is costing taxpayers $250,000 per car. As noted by Hohman, the Volt “might be the most government-supported car since the Trabant,” the car…Read More »

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, one of the annual traditions in Washington D.C. was the announcement of the Golden Fleece Awards, which identified the some of the biggest and silliest things the U.S. federal government wasted money upon during the previous year. Originally launched by former Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), his spirit lives…Read More »

Today, economist Richard Rahn discusses in his Washington Times op-ed “Government spending jobs myth” the Krugman/Keynesian fallacy that government spending produces jobs: If additional government spending could create more jobs, it would be expected that over the long run, the socialist or semisocialist economies would have full employment and the smaller-government, developed economies would have higher unemployment. Again, the…Read More »